Femtocells are the new emerging technology of heterogeneous networks, which are used to improve the signal strength of the networks at homes or indoor. These femtocell devices are operated by Internet or broadband connection to provide good quality of signal strength at homes or indoor where it is difficult to get direct signals or good quality signals from the macro cells. The ranges of these femtocell devices are around a few meters, which are very small. Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is purely based on hard handover, which follows the standard handover technology. Due to the small range of femtocell devices, frequent numbers of handovers occur. So conventional handover schemes generate more delay during handovers, which is not suitable for femtocell networks. In this paper, we discuss the temporary area network handover technique and compare the temporary area-based technique with standard handover technique and prefetch-based techniques.

Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is based on purely hard handover (Dampage and Wavegedara, 2013). LTE follows the conventional handover process for its handover (Rath and Panwar, 2012). Handover occurs when user equipment moves from one cell to another cell. Nowadays, there is requirement of fast handover procedure for femtocells because the size of the femtocells is around 10 to 50 meters. The conventional handover procedure is not suitable for femtocell networks because the size of femtocell is very small, which generates frequent number of handovers (Rath and Panwar, 2012). The conventional scheme of handover is originally defined for macrocell, which generates higher latency during handovers between femto and femto, and femto and macro cells (Dampage and Wavegedara, 2013). Macrocell is denoted by eNodeB, where e is enhanced; and femtocell is denoted by HeNodeB, where h is home. There is no direct path between femto and femto, and femto and macrocell, so handover is the main technical problem of heterogeneous networks (Chandrasekhar and Andrews, 2008).

Telecommunications Journal, Heterogeneous networks, LTE macrocell, Femtocell, Handover, Handover latency .